If you don't have lots of experience you don't want to work for crappy company. If you are experienced you already probably saw a lot of dysfunction and you are more likely to figure out how to work in less than ideal environment.
On the other hand, you don't have experience, you want to learn and it is most likely you are going to learn bad habits working at bad company or for bad manager.
Just stay away. There is enough companies to work for that you don't have to choose from the ones that have warning signs all over them.
But in my own reality, My tangible options were: 1. Pay upfront and study endless hours for a whiteboard interview + hours with phone screening + day spent onsite. 2. On-demand take home challenges (vary from 1-2 days, depending on the company) 3. 1-week payed project with presentation at the end 4. Some cocktail mix of the above
Unless you know the founder, senior managers, or have built rapport with most of the engs of a company, I never been able to push back, not even in markets where the demand was extremely high.
Only if you don't really care what you work on. A lot of people really want to work at specific companies (like Apple or Google) or in a specific field (like finance or games development). In these cases those companies can place a lot higher demands on their applicants and make them jump through a lot more hoops.
If these hoops actually lead to better quality candidates is of course a different question.